The Cantilever Gallery at The Westmoreland is brimming with contemporary artworks created in a broad range of mediums—painting, sculpture, photography, video, stained glass, installation and mixed media.

While the works themselves explore diverse themes using various techniques and materials, each of the artists in this exhibition share one thing in common—they all teach at one of the numerous colleges and universities in our region.

Artists Who Teach celebrates the incredible talent and broad range of art making in this region today. The 58 artists in this exhibition are all inspiring the next generation of artists by teaching at Carlow University, Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Robert Morris University, Seton Hill University, Saint Vincent College, University of Pittsburgh/University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg and Westmoreland County Community College.

The convalescing Cedar of Lebanon in Recuperation simultaneously embodies bleak realism and hopeful romanticism. It is a metaphor for the damage we do to ourselves and how we try to recover. In the daytime version of the painting, pale atmosphere alternates with raw flesh color, suggesting both cruelty and compassion. In the nighttime version, the tree’s amputated limbs are silhouetted against a deep blue vapor.

In 2006, I visited Isola Bella on Lago Maggiore in Italy. That summer, the gardens were in disarray. A freak tornado had torn it apart and uprooted an ancient Cedar of Lebanon. Maintenance workers and gardeners had propped up this huge specimen with pulleys, slings, and guy ropes. Bandages wrapped fractured and stumpy limbs and sprinkler systems were suspended high amongst its branches in hopes for resuscitation. At the time these paintings were made, it was not known if the cedar would survive.

I photographed this poignant spectacle partly because it coincided with my prior research into landscapes of ruin, especially those devastated by war. That summer, the world watched as the 2006 Lebanon War decimated the country, all while the larger war in Iraq raged. The Lebanese town of Qana was attacked for the second time in a decade and suffered extraordinary numbers of civilian deaths, lives that could never be resuscitated.